Can an acronis image of windows 7 be transfered to as SSD?

Yes, ATI is smart enough to do the right thing on an SSD. The most important is the alignment of the partition location. This disk alignment can be checked after the restore manually. If for any reason the alignment was wrong, the system could boot but the performance would be very decreased. Alignment can be changed manually as well, or with some tools, or you could redo the restore manually to ensure the alignment.

Thanks for your reply Pat, when you say disk alignment what exactly are you referring to, partition size or something else.

What I intend to do is install the SSD, boot into my standard windows on the present HDD, partition the SSD, then copy the acronis image over to it, use EasyBCD to create a boot letter to it, then reatart windows to try to boot into the SSD.

But maybe its not as simple as that, with this disk alignment thing, wonder if there is any article to explain it easy in laymans terms.

many thanks
Joe

To do what you have to do, you would rather boot the computer on the Acronis restore CD. It would be easier to use the 2015 version to do so. If you use the 2010 version, you will have to create the target partitions manually then restore each partition on the corresponding manually created partition. To get the SSD alignment, leave a 1MB unallocated space at the beginning of the disk, then size each partition to be an exact whole number of MB (a multiple of 1024 bytes). Then use ATI to restore each partition; don't forget to mark the right partition active (typically "system reserved") when you restore.

To verify that your SSD is aligned, you can enter your SSD information here http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

OR

You can launch MSinfo32.exe, components, hardware, disks. Check the offset of each partition on your disk. It must be evenly divisible by 4096 when expressed in bytes.

Just restore it and start up from the ssd.
I have done this many times already from a regular drive to ssd and there is no problem at all.
Even if there was, ssd is so dang much faster then a spinning drive it won't be very noticeable.

Same here. I first did it in 2012 and never had any problems ,even considering my HD was bigger than my SDD RAID 0 array. I used a defrag tool that moved all my data to the beginning of the HD volume, then reduced the size of it first though. Didn't have any alignment problems, even on that version of TI.

I must admit, depite other issues, Acronis did get this right. It's one of the main reasons I stick with them.

Thanks so much for all the help I really appreciate.

usually I only do backups and restore with acronis so when you say Pat,

"To get the SSD alignment, leave a 1MB unallocated space at the beginning of the disk, then size each partition to be an exact whole number of MB (a multiple of 1024 bytes)."

Just wonder what is the procedure to do that, even a link showing it would be extremely helpful?
Can I use windows disk management to do this on the SSD from within windows 7 on my present HDD, and at the same time create all the partitions I need on the SSD?

As well as this my present windows partitions are 146gb I think (I have acronis 2010 images of these) but I was thinking of making this partition larger on the SSD say 180gb, so if 1024 mb is 1 gb that will show as 175.78GB

I intend to have maybe four partitions on SSD so I take it I only have to have a 1mb unallocated at start of disk?

Sorry for all the questions guys and thank you for all your help.
joe

Here is a brief on SSD alignment and some basic instruction on how to do that.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html

The purpose of alignment on an SSD is so that data will be evenly distributed across the entire drives memory cell structure. If alignment is not performed then data can be written to the disk in a manner that can cause files to occupy only portions of memory cells. Since SSD's are for the most part small in size disk space is a premium so alignment is desirable.

Acronis True Image recognizes SSD and creates the correct offset automatically. In the link above there are instructions on how to check disk alignment. I Suggest that you do this on your source disk to see what current alignment is. If the disk is properly aligned you should be good to go.

You do not need to format your new SSD, using it as is out of box should render the desired result upon restoration. If you have done a format or partition on the drive I advise that you remove such. The Dsikpart Clean command can do this for you.

If you are not familiar with the use of Diskpart you need to get that way as this is a powerful tool that if used incorrectly can render your system unbootable.

The first thing I would do is simply restore the image to the SSD. Then check the alignment of the partitions. If the alignment is wrong, we'll help you do the manual operation.

joemardo1 wrote:

"To get the SSD alignment, leave a 1MB unallocated space at the beginning of the disk, then size each partition to be an exact whole number of MB (a multiple of 1024 bytes)."

Use diskpart running from the Windows installation DVD, or from Windows. Diskpart let you specify offsets in bytes but partition sizes in megabytes. Remember that 1024 bytes is a kilobyte, and 1024 kilobyte is a megabyte.
- first partition should start with an offset of 1mb
- each partition should have a whole number of mb (simple method to make its size divisible by 4096 when expressed in bytes).

Just wonder what is the procedure to do that, even a link showing it would be extremely helpful?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Can I use windows disk management to do this on the SSD from within windows 7 on my present HDD, and at the same time create all the partitions I need on the SSD?

As well as this my present windows partitions are 146gb I think (I have acronis 2010 images of these) but I was thinking of making this partition larger on the SSD say 180gb, so if 1024 mb is 1 gb that will show as 175.78GB

I intend to have maybe four partitions on SSD so I take it I only have to have a 1mb unallocated at start of disk?

Sorry for all the questions guys and thank you for all your help.
joe

YOu will get more precise size numbers using Diskpart than with Windows disk management. This is important for alignment

Thanks a lot everybody for your very helpful reply.

I have an application on my computer called mini tool partition wizard, says that it is able to align disk, so maybe another option open to me as regards alignment.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/align-all-partitions.html

Thanks
Joe

Yes, that will work.

Thank you Pat and everyone for your very helpful advice.
Joe